


The shit has hit the fan

by columbine_and_asphodel (onlycrooks)



Series: The Innocent Bystander [8]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: F/M, Guilt, Marital Problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 04:52:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onlycrooks/pseuds/columbine_and_asphodel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He does not fail. His men had trusted him with their lives and his wife with hers. He was good at what he did and could be relied upon to prevail in even the darkest circumstances. As he lies in listless contemplation, he sees that the violence of his strength is not the unstoppable force he'd thought it to be.</p><p>Or: Life starts to fall apart around him, and Steve finds himself weak before the onslaught of failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The shit has hit the fan

**Author's Note:**

> Gah, sorry for taking so long to update. My body wasn't cooperating. Worse, this story wasn't, either. I'm pretty sure that it's massively OOC for Steve, but I can't deal with editing it any more. It's better than it was the first four times 'round, and for the sake of my sanity/my need to give you beautiful dears another chapter, here it is.
> 
> Thank you so much for all the get well wishes and concerns about my PICC line. Lyme Disease and I are bitter rivals, so my doctor's decided that it's time for the much bigger guns. That's not as important, though, as how encouraging it is to hear from you all. Honestly, you're better to me than the friends I have in RL; you keep me going.

Steve's throat is still burning as he turns into his driveway. It burns as he parks the truck, stumbles into the house and walks up the stairs to his bedroom. By the time he opens the door- so different from the door he'd broken earlier- and half-blindly makes his way to bed, it's made its way into his mouth, and all he can taste is the acrid burn of bile.

It isn't until he's flat on his back, his stomach rolling with guilt and mouth full of the aftertaste of vomit, that he realizes that he isn't alone. Someone is sitting a chair a few away from the bed, watching him.

"Welcome home, Steve. You were out pretty late tonight," comes Cath's wearyvoice.

Steve finds that he doesn't have the strength to talk.

"Look, Cath, can we please not talk right now?" His voice comes out raw, cracking on its way out.

"No, Steve, we can't 'not talk right now.' I can't believe you can just... come back here like this, as if you belong in our bed," she says. "Aren't you ashamed? Doesn't our marriage mean _anything_ to you?"

The pain in her voice makes him roll onto his side to look at her. The weak light from the lamp on her side of the bed casts a pallid glow across her face. His wife is a beautiful woman, but as she sits across from him, he can't help but think that something's made her ugly.

When he finally realizes that she asked him if their marriage means anything, the force of the accusation hits him in the chest and nearly knocks him onto his back.

"Of course it does! How can you think it doesn't?"

"Don't lie to me!" she responds, anger replacing sadness. "If it really meant something to you, you'd be _here,_ Steve, not... elsewhere." Her voice loses its sharpness as she stands up and comes to kneel on the beside his head. "You aren't here, not really, and you haven't been for a long time."

"Cath, believe me. I really don't know what you're talking about," he quietly pleads, trying to stop the conversation from spinning completely out of control. He doesn't understand what she's talking about, but he can tell that this a "make it or break it" moment and that their marriage is hanging in the balance.

When Cath draws a shaky breath, it's all he can do not to reach out and run his hand down the side of her face. He wants to, _yearns_ to, but the voice in the back of his head- the one that's kept him alive so far- tells him that now is the wrong time.

"I know what you did earlier."

Confused, Steve tries to remember "earlier" but doesn't come up with anything useful. He's too tired, too exhausted, for this conversation. Cath's always been better at arguing than he, mainly because she has the patience to wear him down. It's something he never had to combat in the past. With his father, then in the Navy- particularly the SEALs- arguing hadn't been tolerated, and with Danny...

With Danny, one- usually Danny, ever the hothead- or both of them would blow up, effectively ending the argument. Danny would walk away, and Steve would go off on his own to think, only to get chewed out and have everything explained to him- complete with furious gesticulations- by his partner later. It had worked, though, and he and Danny hadn't ever had an argument they couldn't settle. (He carefully doesn't let the memory of his partner walking away come to mind.)

When it comes to arguing with Cath, though, he's completely out of his depth, and they both know it, which only makes the gap between them still wider.

Since Steve doesn't reply quickly enough, his wife supplies him with what he did.

"A whorehouse, McGarrett! You went to some rundown whorehouse! I know we haven't been having much sex lately, but I thought you were okay with that since you're the one who hasn't had much interest in it. I thought that maybe we could we take a vacation-"

"Vacation?" His mind is muddling through "whorehouse," so he tries to buy time by cutting Cath off and hopefully distracting her enough to avoid getting steamrolled. "What are you talking about, a vacation? We live in Hawaii!"

"And we work in Hawaii, too!"

"I can't just _leave,_ though; this is my home, and I don't want to leave it unprotected. I thought youunderstood that!"

"Steve..." she starts to say, but drops off and just shakes her head sadly. When she reaches out to put her hands on his face, however, he bolts upright and grabs them before they can land on him. He's finally figured out what she meant about the whorehouse and knows he has to set her straight.

"Wait. You... you think I'm _cheating_ on you?"

"What else would you be doing in a whorehouse?" she demands, using Steve's grip on her wrists to haul him to his feet. She draws breath to shout, but instead, she sighs and leans forward to rest her head against his chest.

"I was helping someone," he starts to say, but Cath rounds on him, going from wearily leaning against him to in his face in the space of a breath.

"You were 'helping' someone, huh? Were you helping her get off?"

"No, no, it wasn't like that!"

"Then what was it like? You didn't tell Kono or Chin anything about helping someone, and you certainly didn't tell me! What if we could've helped? What if we'd _wanted_ to help?"

"I didn't know that I was going to be doing anything! I was just going to dinner with Grace-"

"And Danny?"

"What about Danny? He wasn't there, Cath; it was just Grace and me. We were talking, catching up since I haven't seen her in three years, and at one point she said she was worried about someone. Since I didn't think anything would go wrong, I said I'd help her and didn't bother to call it in."

"And where was I while this happened?"

Steve froze. Where had Cath been? What did that have to do with-

"On the calendar it said that you were on a girls' night out..."

"A 'girls' night out' is code for going on a particular stakeout. You're the one who came up with the name for it, Steve. What's gotten into you?"

 _Dammit,_ he thinks. _She's right. Seeing Danny like that... Shit!_ _And if Cath was there... did she see me? Did she see_ Danny _?_

"I didn't see you, but my informant did. She recognized you from the picture in my purse."

"And you believe her over anything I might say," he says flatly, studying her for anything to indicate that she knows that Danny works there- or heard what happened with Danny, the john and him. That she would just believe a _criminal_ informant without eve talking to him doesn't bode well.

"Maybe if you actually looked beyond Danny, you'd know why!" Cath fumes.

His first reaction is incredulity. He looks quite a bit further than Danny; he know he does. Doesn't he? His second reaction is fear. It makes him nervously glance around the room, and he suddenly realizes something. There's nothing to indicate that Cath lives with him anymore. There's nothing to indicate that Steve even lives with any woman, which leads into the third reaction: betrayal.

"You're leaving me, then," he states. It's obvious. It's so obvious that he's angry at himself for not catching it earlier. Why didn't he notice it earlier?

Doing this just because he's been worried about Danny, though, seems wrong. What could he have done to upset her this much?

"Five months, Steve- I've been doing this over the course of _five_ months. I've even got an apartment set up on Kauai that you were too distracted to realize I'd started renting."

Looking at her now, he can see that this isn't about fighting for their marriage; Cath's beyond the point of trying to save their marriage. They must have passed that point long ago, and he hadn't been paying attention. Their marriage had probably been dead for years; he just hadn't realized it. Now, when he needs someone stable in his life, Cath is telling him that she wants out.

Steve doesn't break down. He doesn't beg her to stay or try to explain further. He's known Cath for too long to think that she'll change her mind. No, he's losing the love of his life, and all he can do is stand in the middle of the bare bedroom and distractedly ponder how Chin and Kono will react, both to Cath and him splitting and to Danny's... new occupation.

In the back of his mind, he notices that Cath walks away, her purse swinging at her side as if it were rocking with laughter. It probably is.

That night, when he finally manages to crawl back into bed, no matter how many layers he pulls over himself, he can't seem to ward off the insistent waves of cold shivers- or stop his brain from laughing at the tears skipping down his cheeks as it recites lines from the awful sonnets he'd thought were long forgotten.

  
_Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,_  
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,  
Thy beauty, and thy years full well befits,  
For still temptation follows where thou art.  
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,  
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed.  


* * *

He goes into work earlier than usual, intending to buy time to figure out how best to break the news to them. Instead, he finds Chin and Kono already hard at work on their latest case, one the governor himself gave to them. A few high ranking politicians have been accused of being involved in human trafficking and prostitution. Denning wants Five-0 to determine whether or not the accusations are true, and if they are, he wants the operation shut down. Unfortunately, if they are involved, the politicians have been doing a good job of not leaving any evidence behind, and the only way left is to send someone in, which they can't do. They and all of HPD's officers are recognizable. To make matters worse, the FBI's gotten involved, too.

The whole situation's had the four- now three, judging by Cath's empty desk, which he refuses to contemplate- of them on edge, working extra hours either pouring over the politicians' finances and personal lives or physically trying to persuade someone to come forward. The lack of results in both areas has had them all on edge.

When they see him, Chin and Kono's faces are slightly too blank, which tells Steve that they know. Cath probably told them yesterday while he was with Grace. He isn't upset by it, is actually relieved. It just means that he doesn't have to tell them.

He calls them to his office, waving at them to sit on the couch, while he pulls up a chair. The gesture is one he's seen Danny make hundreds of times; it's just one of many habits Steve had picked up from the the Jersey detective.

They don't pity him, that he can see, and Steve's glad for it- another reason why he loves his team. Chin doesn't try to keep his ring out of sight, and Kono doesn't bother to hide the small smile she gets when she looks at her phone and sees the text from the man she's seeing. They know that acting differently around him will only make it worse, so they don't bother. It's just business as usual- perfect.

"I know you already know about Cath and me," he begins, noticing their twin nods, "so I'm going to move on to the second thing I need to tell you." Again, he sees that Chin and Kono react the same way: leaning forward slightly.

This is the hard part. He doesn't quite know how to tell them about Danny. Should he just say it? Should he ease into it? Breaking bad news has always been the part of leadership he's hated the most.

Before he can say anything, however, Kono speaks up.

"Is this about Danny?"

The question throws him, and Steve can only look at her, confused. Luckily, Chin takes over from her.

"Remember that case we worked, the middle of last year- drug ring, lead by that huge Samoan?" Steve nods; it's one of the cases he'll never forget. For someone so seemingly innocent, the leader had been happy to slash people's guts open, place a bag of sugar- meant to resemble cocaine- in the hole, then walk away.

Chin returns the nod, then continues. "In order to catch him, we had to talk to one of Sang Min's guys. Kono and I went to talk to him while you and Cath questioned the one survivor of the Samoan's execution. We were lucky that he was so chatty; he practically told us exactly where to find the warehouse and gave over a dozen names of high-ranking men in the ring. We weren't so lucky when he mentioned that the ring had its fingers in a bit of prostitution, that the Samoan was pleased to have, 'the pretty blonde policeman' working for him as a prostitute. We weren't sure whether to believe him or not, so we camped out outside the building he claimed was the brothel, and just like he said, we saw Danny go in."

"What if he was going in as a... patron, or something?" He knows he's just clawing for an excuse, for something to tell him that Danny hasn't been whoring himself out for as long as Chin's claiming, and Chin knows it, too.

"Steve," he says, reaching out and laying a hand on Steve's knee, "no one goes looking for a whore wearing the look Danny had... Plus, Kono and I went back the day after, then a day the next week, and Danny was still going. Sang Min's man was telling the truth; there's no other explanation."

When Steve doesn't reply, Kono takes his hand in hers. "You don't think he'd need sex that badly, do you?" she asks quietly. "He's a good looking guy. If he needed someone, he could just go to a bar or something."

"How come you didn't tell me?" he asks, feeling bile rise in the back of his throat. The burn is almost pleasant, its company becoming familiar, a type of unwelcome comfort.

"We didn't think you'd be able to take it, brah. Danny's stubborn, so if this is what he's doing... this is what he's going to do. There's nothing anyone can do to change that, so we thought it would do more harm than good for you to know."

They're right, of course. Danny's always had his pride, and if being a whore earns more money for him to spend on Grace, then that's what he'll do. He'll sell his body for strangers to abuse, and he'll do it with pride.

Knowing that doesn't settle his stomach or ease the guilt that's come to rest on him.

He spends the rest of the day following Chin and Kono's directions, knowing he isn't fit to make good decisions. All he can think about is Danny and Cath and how cold he is- all while his brain keeps laughing at him, telling him he's missing something.

**Author's Note:**

> The sonnet Steve remembers (the beginning lines of it, at least) is Shakespeare's Forty First Sonnet. Despite my hatred of him (Honestly, the man/men wrote wonderful things, true, but there are so many loopholes and such that really degrade the work. I despise reading things by him for reasons beyond the archaic speech, since I actually adore that) I felt that this was fitting.
> 
> The whole thing- and loads of other sonnets of his- can be found [here](http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/41).
> 
> On a completely unrelated note, have any of you seen _My Own Private Idaho_ or _Mysterious Skin_? If you have time and you haven't seen them, I suggest trying them. They're both raunchy and messed up and tore me apart, but damn, they're good. (MOPI kind of made me fall in love with River Pheonix, and _Mysterious Skin_ gave me a crazy case of the need-to-shelter-from-harm-and-love-tenderly for Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)


End file.
